11 ms·

> I'm going to be honest here and say that I don't know what Microsoft's actual motivation for requiring a TPM in Windows 11 is. It is quite obvious: to force

• santoshalper 2y ago
  If you're going to run Windows 11 anyway, why would Microsoft care if you do it on a new or older PC?
  • quikthrowaway 2y ago
    Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrades are free. You know what's not free? The Windows license on a brand new computer if it's bundled with Windows. And here's a friendly reminder that the vast majority of users don't know how to build their own computer and install an operating system, even if it truly has been made extremely simple nowadays.
  • z3phyr 2y ago
    Most of the people using Microsoft have OEM licence. When people buy new hardware, people are buying a new license of Windows as well.
  • jasomill 2y ago
    Customers are typically unhappy when Microsoft refuses to fix critical bugs that only arise when running Windows on older hardware. To the average user, "Windows installs without error and hardware appears to work" = "Microsoft supports running Windows on this hardware", even if the hardware is EOL and requires drivers that haven't been updated since Windows Vista.
• soerxpso 2y ago
  Microsoft doesn't sell hardware. Why would they be incentivized to make you buy new hardware? Unless you're alleging that their hardware partners pushed for it, in which case there would likely be logs of communications that are pretty illegal.
  • santoshalper 2y ago
    They do sell some PCs, but their market share is very low, and I can't imagine it's a significant part of their revenue. They definitely wouldn't bother slowing down Windows 11 adoption to sell a few more Surface Books.
    • jasomill 2y ago
      About 1.9% ($4.706 billion) of Microsoft's FY 2024 revenue was from devices "including Surface, HoloLens, and PC accessories" (and not including Xbox hardware). About 9.5% ($23.244 billion) was from Windows "including Windows OEM licensing and other non-volume licensing of the Windows operating system; Windows Commercial, comprising volume licensing of the Windows operating system, Windows cloud services, and other Windows commercial offerings; patent licensing; and Windows Internet of Things." Compared to FY 2023, devices revenue decreased 15% and Windows revenue increased 8%. Source: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/ https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/
  • quikthrowaway 2y ago
    They don't sell hardware, but they get paid when their hardware partners sell you a new laptop with Windows on it.
    • jsnell 2y ago
      Ok, so the theory is that Microsoft is after the revenue from Windows 11 licenses? And the way they're achieving this is by forcing people who want to upgrade from Windows 10 to buy a new machine rather than install Windows 11 on their existing machines? If that was the motivation, there's a far more direct option available. Just charge for the upgrade. For this theory to work, it would have to be that there's a significant population that a) wants to run Windows 11 instead of Windows 10; b) will buy a new computer to do that; c) would not pay the price of an OEM license for a version upgrade.
• Hilift 2y ago
  Strategies change over time, including Microsoft's. TPM was previously envisioned as a broader physical storage for secrets, such as virtual smart cards. Microsoft no longer likes virtual smart cards, but TPM is still used for storing data for measured boot attestation. Also, at the time Microsoft was attempting to broaden support for TPM where it is restricted, such as China, which does not allow foreign TPM chips. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/tpm/tpm-fundamentals https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...
• Rohansi 2y ago
  Requiring TPM can actually benefit multiplayer video games because it introduces a secure way to identify hardware being used by cheaters. Right now everything being used by games is easily spoofed by cheats so cheaters just need to get a new account to continue cheating after being banned.
  • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    Anti-cheat is a lousy cover for something that's going to be much more lucrative when used to correlate the accounts of journalists and whistleblowers such that they can be silenced. It's censorship tech.
    • devops99 2y ago
      This here is a stronger motivator than any other motivator mentioned in all other comments posted. And "journalist" will include anyone who has the "wrong" memes on their machine.
  • watermelon0 2y ago
    Such restrictions usually mean that you can't play games via Windows VM or on Linux directly. Additionally, there are cheats using video capture cards, which cannot practically be prevented.
    • bjoli 2y ago
      Wait what? I don't game, so this is new to me. Do you have more info? That seems pretty cool.
      • botanical76 2y ago
        There are cheats that give you more information than you should have. These typically require access to the game process's memory space. If you're cheating with a video capture card, this likely means you're allowing a program to rewrite your inputs to more accurately target player models. You will likely be banned if you do this on the same machine via screen capture. A video capture card can process the information on a separate computer, e.g. location of enemies by searching for specific colours, then write into a virtual USB mouse on the gaming rig to keep the player's crosshair on the enemy model. I'm not sure about specifics, but this kind of cheat is almost undetectable; it is only really mitigated by the cost and effort involved to do it. Players can add additional mitigations on top of this, like only activating aim assist while the shoot button is pressed, to make it entirely undetectable.
• p_ing 2y ago
  > TPM provides no added security value for the vast majority of users[1] Yes it does. The vast majority of users aren't going to have their laptop stolen by the CIA/NSA and have their DIMMs popped and cryofreezed. The vast majority of users aren't going to have the case opened and a special-purpose PCIe device installed to steal keys over DMA. The vast majority of users aren't going to have a dTPM vulnerable to SPI sniffing as modern and not-so-modern processors have fTPM. This is to provide some baseline level of protection of the user's data against theft and loss. Are there attacks against TPM? Yep. In as much as there are attacks against SMS 2FA, but for the vast majority of people, SMS 2FA is an acceptable level of security. If you're a CEO, well sure, you're going to want to do something better (TPM + PIN). I acknowledge that Windows 11 Home users don't have this specific option. Everyone needs to level set on the type of attacks that are practical vs. involved and who the targets of those attacks are. FDE (w/ TPM) is part of defense-in-depth. Even if imperfect, it's another layer of protection.
  • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > The vast majority of users aren't going to have their laptop stolen by the CIA/NSA and have their DIMMs popped and cryofreezed. That's kind of the point. The vast majority of users aren't going to have their laptop stolen at all, if they do it will 99% of the time be by someone who only wants to wipe it and fence it, and attempts to access data are most likely to be by unsophisticated family members who would be defeated by a simple password without any TPM. Meanwhile there have been plenty of TPM vulnerabilities that don't require anything so esoteric and can often be attacked purely from software, so if a normal user was facing even so much as someone willing to watch some security conference talks, they're going to lose regardless. If the TPM doesn't make them more vulnerable to that, because it contains the secrets and is susceptible to attack, vs. FDE with a boot key stored in some cloud service secured with the user's password instead of a TPM, which can then rate limit attempts without being susceptible to physical access attacks and be revoked if the device is stolen. Moreover, the more common threat to normal users is data loss, in which case you only want your laptop to be secure against your unsophisticated nephew and not the tech you want to recover your data after you forget your password. > In as much as there are attacks against SMS 2FA, but for the vast majority of people, SMS 2FA is an acceptable level of security. The current recommendation seems to be against SMS 2FA because the security of SMS really is that bad, so if you need 2FA, use an authenticator app or similar. > FDE (w/ TPM) is part of defense-in-depth. Any snake oil can be painted as defense-in-depth.
• torginus 2y ago
  hard disagree. All security requires a root of trust. If you don't have that, how can you ensure you're not running on a mailicious hypervisor, you've not loaded any bad drivers etc. You can only guess, and badly at that. Because we don't have it, that's why we get crap like kernel-level anti-cheat, various 'security' solutions made by companies of dubious reputation and technical ability, just because you refused to trust Microsoft. And even if these companies are somehow not malicious, and can be trusted, they still often compromise the stability and security of the OS. The amount of crap Riot's anti-cheat and Crowdstrike has caused is well documented. It's the computer security equivalent of not trusting Big Pharma, and taking a random assortment of herbal medicine coming from god knows where, and containing god knows what.
  • BlueTemplar 2y ago
    And trusting Microsoft is the equivalent of thinking the Earth is flat. See, I can make insulting comparisons too...
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Trusting microsoft is a deal breaker.
• m463 2y ago
  Microsoft is just trying to match features with apple which does the sorts of things with the T2 chip. Home users probably don't care that much, but corporate users do. That said, the root of all DRM is not the TPM or the GPU or whatever... it is hollywood.
  • p_ing 2y ago
    You mean Apple matched features with Microsoft. Devices with dTPM were released in 2006. BitLocker leveraging dTPM released with Windows Vista. Corporations have been using BitLocker w/ TPM for nearly two decades at this point.
    • zamadatix 2y ago
      You're referring to first usage but I think the above is about first guarantee of what ALL products in the platform will have. Corporate purchases or BYOD, you can assume an Apple product has a reasonably secure way of storing the user's VPN key or whatever.
• red_admiral 2y ago
  My guess is that the b2b sales of Windows outnumber b2c, if not in volume then certainly in revenue. Suddenly, enforcing company security policies centrally without the client (laptop) being able to change then and still attest to connect to the corporate VPN, becomes a feature. After all, it's not your computer, it's the company's. I think inTune already uses the TPM for that kind of stuff, so "install this before we let you into outlook web, and also we'll check you're not a year behind with windows updates" is a thing.
  • iforgotpassword 2y ago
    But then you can already use tpm as a business. No need to force it upon end users.
• everdrive 2y ago
  I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't actually understand what a TPM does. My vague and probably incorrect impression is that it performs some sort of encrypted verification of firmware or hardware modules? Can anyone expand on what this does? My impression would be that this is not useful for most users, and would be much of a concern in industrial espionage situations. I have no confidence that I'm correct here.
  • rtkwe 2y ago
    It's a secure storage spot for crypto keys and performing crypto operations for things like bitlocker and validating device or OSs for secure boot. If you know of the Apple Secure Enclave it's a more generic version of that, a place where even the device vendor (in theory, who knows what techniques the secret squirrels of the world have hidden away) cannot extract the actual key material from only request operations performed using that info. That's my understanding at least.
  • Ajedi32 2y ago
    The simplest and most obvious use-case is allowing you to encrypt your hard drive using a key stored in tamper-resistant hardware rather than having to rely on the user to select a passphrase complex enough to resist offline brute force attacks.
    • everdrive 2y ago
      Oh, that's interesting. So in the TPM case, I could not have a password to have an encrypted volume? And if I removed that hard drive from the computer, there would be no way to recover it? But from the user's perspective, it would be transparent and they might not even know it's encrypted?
      • Ajedi32 2y ago
        Yes, that's very common. In Windows 11 Pro (not sure about other editions) you can enable BitLocker and turn on auto unlock with no PIN. Though if someone steals the whole PC I'm not sure how effective that is. With a PIN set the TPM will enforce rate limiting to prevent brute force attacks, which should be more effective in that scenario. Most modern phones do something similar: user data is encrypted with a TPM key accessed using your lock screen code on boot-up.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  I thought it was to DRM media?
  • andrewaylett 2y ago
    As the article points out, the TPM is not in a good place, architecturally, to use for DRM: there's no path from the TPM to the screen that's not under OS (and thereby user) control.
    • alex7734 2y ago
      The whole point of TPM is that the OS is not under the user control anymore. If you modify it thanks to remote attestation you can no longer prove that it is unmodified using the TPM.
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
        Do they mean that no OS modification is necessary to read the decrypted media from memory?
        • alex7734 2y ago
          Currently, no. But once (undetectable) OS modification is no longer possible, making the undecrypted media unreadable is just a few API restrictions away. In Android phones for example you cannot screenshot banking apps. And if you root (modify the OS of) your phone, banking apps refuse to work.
          • andrewaylett 2y ago
            However, for the question at hand, that's irrelevant: a better (for DRM) solution exists today, and they're already using it. I'm not saying that the TPM is incapable of being abused by manufacturers and OS authors, but the FSF really weakens their argument when they predicate it on something that's not actually true. Ex falso quodlibet (you may prove anything if you rely on a falsehood).
• bitwize 2y ago
  I'm convinced Microsoft is prepping to make Windows as locked down as the Xbox, so that they can have final approval over apps that run on the platform and skim the top off app sales. Apple has shown that the game console model can work for non-gaming software, and Microsoft wants in on that third-party app cheddar.
• michaelt 2y ago
  The TPM is a great thing, from Microsoft's perspective. Because Microsoft have the Secure Boot code signing keys. And none of their users expect a "free software philosophy" that lets them use their own modified kernel, or DKMS to build new copies of kernel modules on demand - so you don't have to make users jump through any "machine owner key" hoops. And a lot of your customers are big corporations who barely trust their own employees - and inexperienced users for whom forgotten passwords and suchlike are a big problem. With the TPM, that corporation's shared PC at the reception desk can have an encrypted disk without all the receptionists needing to know the password, only their own passwords. With the TPM you can remotely force a reboot to install updates, and the computer will fully boot afterwards - not get stuck at a disk encryption prompt. Ideal if your corporate work-from-home policy is for employees to remote desktop on a PC under their desk. With the TPM, the PC can boot, unlock the disk and join wifi before any passwords have been entered - so a corporation's employees only need to remember their windows password, and if they forget it, helpdesk can reset it remotely. It's great for the user too, who doesn't lose their non-backed-up data. With the TPM you can have a short, weak passcode to unlock your PC, without worrying about brute force attacks. That's great if you want a cell-phone-style experience - or if you find long passwords an inconvenience, rather than a badge of honour. With the TPM a corporation can give a laptop to a service engineer, who'd really like to install some games to play when he's stuck in a hotel over night for a service call, and who has unsupervised physical access - secure in the knowledge it's very difficult for them to install unapproved software. For a corporation that wants hardware-bound keys, the TPM is superior to things like Yubikeys, precisely because of its inflexibility. Why give people a second factor that keeps working when they move PCs and that's compatible with different platforms, if you never want them to move PCs or change platforms without going through you? It just so happens that the majority of these only benefit large corporations and forgetful users, while most Linux users are quite happy remembering long unique disk encryption passwords thanks very much.
  • dingnuts 2y ago
    > while most Linux users are quite happy remembering long unique disk encryption passwords thanks very much. Which brings something up: how do you get back in if you suffer a traumatic brain injury or something like that? I feel like a lot of software assumes the operator can do things like remember unique passwords for a long time. Sure, I can do that NOW, but will I still be able to in my seventies?
• elorant 2y ago
  Whatever their motivation is, disabling TPM from Bios is the safest way to avoid upgrading to Win11.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• sidewndr46 2y ago
  I'm relatively certain one of the motivations is to avoid people using Windows on virtualization without their consent.